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Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
After experiencing both SWupdate and Mender in the past we recently got the opportunity to work with another update framework for embedded systems called RAUC.
This time the choice of RAUC as system upgrade framework was mainly motivated by the Phytec IMX6 board ecosystem which is based on both Barebox and Yocto Project. Indeed RAUC and Barebox are both developed by Pengutronix and both are designed to provide a complete and homogeneous solution that will be introduced in this post.
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here, here, and here) and 2021 LInux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit. At least two of these sessions mentioned the question of how Rust is to handle the Linux-kernel memory model (LKMM), and I volunteered to write this blog series on this topic.
This series focuses mostly on use cases and opportunities, rather than on any non-trivial solutions. Please note that I am not in any way attempting to dictate or limit Rust’s level of ambition. I am instead noting the memory-model consequences of a few potential levels of ambition, ranging from “portions of a few drivers”, “a few drivers”, “some core code” and up to and including “the entire kernel”. Greater levels of ambition will require greater willingness to accommodate a wider variety of LKMM requirements.
Given this week’s release of Fedora 35 Beta I have begun my benchmarking to look at how this next installment of Fedora Linux is shaping up given that it tends to be at the forefront of open-source innovations given Red Hat’s investments. For our initial F35 benchmarking is looking at the Fedora Server 35 Beta performance compared to Fedora 35 on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server.
This initial testing is quite straight-forward and from the same Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 “Ice Lake” reference platform, Fedora 34, Fedora 34 with all stable release updates, and Fedora 35 Beta were carried out for seeing how this H2’2021 Linux distribution release update is looking. The stable release of Fedora 35 is currently expected for the end of October.
Video editing is the process of editing motion video footage. In the new age of personal video, video editing is becoming a central function of the desktop, with the popularity of video editing software ever increasing.
Any self-respecting operating system that has ambitions on becoming the dominant force on the desktop therefore needs to have a good selection of video editing software. Video sharing websites such as YouTube are now enormously popular with hundreds of thousands of new videos uploaded every day.
Inkscape, the most used and loved tool of Fedora’s Design Team is not just a program for doing nice vector graphics. With vector graphics (in our case SVG) a lot more can be done. Many programs can import this format. Also, Inkscape can do a lot more than just graphics. The last article of this series showed how to design embroidery with Inkscape and the extension Ink/Stitch. This time, several extensions for Inkscape will be examined. All are helpful for working with so called Stroke or Hershey Fonts.
Inkscape version 0.91+ includes an extension called Hershey Text – Extensions > Text > Hershey Text. This extension brings a small set of Stroke Fonts or Hershey Fonts. If you try testing all of the extensions Inkscape comes with, you might get to this one and ask yourself, “What is it for? It just renders text?”
GitLab is a free and open-source DevOps platform that allows teams to iterate faster and innovate together. It is a web-based tool developed by GitLab Inc. It is very similar to GitHub and provides a Git repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking, and continuous integration and deployment. GitLab community edition is available absolutely free for development and production environment.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install GitLab with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Debian 11.
VirtualBox is a free and open-source hypervisor for x86 and x86-64 virtualization, which the Oracle Corporation develops. The software targets users wishing to create virtual environments for servers and desktops that allow users and administrations to run multiple guest operating systems on a single computer for either testing methods or production use. VirtualBox may be installed on Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, and OpenSolaris.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VirtualBox on your Pop!_OS 20.04 desktop, along with creating a new Virtual Machine from scratch.
Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that enables anonymous communication when using online services such as web surfing. The Tor network directs the Internet traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to find more ways to keep their information and activities anonymous or at least as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years as it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest Tor Browser on Pop!_OS 20.04.
When installing Linux Mint, the user account that was created during the initial setup has sudo rights. However, there may be a need to add additional sudo users or to remove the access. This is a straightforward process with a few commands.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to add a user to the sudoers group on any current Linux Mint system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Telnet on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Telnet is a protocol that allows you to connect to remote computers (called hosts) over a TCP/IP network using a client-server protocol to establish a connection. Telnet listens to all the requests by the user usually on TCP port 23, but you can change it accordingly.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Telnet on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
The seemingly insignificant #! characters at the beginning of a shell script has a major significance on how your script will be executed.
While I tend to think about the nodes in OpenStack term, the people that physically move the servers around are more familiar with their IPMI address. We have several nodes that are not responding to IPMI requests. Some have been put into the manageable state, some are in error.
If an OpenStack server (Ironic or Nova) has an error, it shows up in a nested field. That field is hard to read in its normal layout, due to JSON formatting. Using jq to strip the formatting helps a bunch
My team is running a small OpenStack cluster with reposnsibility for providing bare metal nodes via Ironic. Currently, we have a handful of nodes that are not usable. They show up as “Cleaning failed.” I’m learning how to debug this process.
Developer 2Awesome Studio has released Aeon Drive, a cyberpunk themed platformer with a speedrunning theme.
Aeon Drive stars Jackelyne, a space ranger desperate to get home. Voiced by actress Kira Buckland, who is best known for the voice of 2B in Nier: Automata, Reimi Sugimoto in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable, Trucy Wright in the Ace Attorney series, and Hiyoko Saionji in the Danganronpa series (and a lot more). Armed with a power sword and teleportation dagger, Jackelyne must dash through the neon-infused metropolis of Neo Barcelona, using time and space-bending abilities to find all the drive cores to fix her ship – and save the city from doom.
While today will see the Steam Next Fest arrive, Valve have more plans as the digital Tabletop Fest returns to Steam between October 21 – 25 and this time around it’s all about the RPGs.
Kicking off at 10 AM PST / 5 PM UTC it will see a big sale with hundreds of titles discounted, so you might want to start filling up your wishlist. There will also be around 18 hours of streaming from developers, which is being done in partnership with Auroch Digital. Starting off with Robert Kurvitz, lead writer and designer on Disco Elysium.
The Arduinos take input from switches and control knobs, but also run 7-segment displays and analog dials driven by servos. The panels were all laser-cut using MDF or perspex and backlit using LEDs.
I consider Half-Life: Alyx played in VR to be one of the greatest gaming experiences I’ve ever had but for a lot of people it’s just not possible and so the No VR Mod is in progress.
For whatever reason some cannot use VR be it due to price, physical ability and more. But if you still want to be able to experience the story first-hand you’re currently a bit stuck. There are a few hacky mods floating around to enable mouse/keyboard support but they’re all really quite rough. The No VR Mod looks like a different breed though, with smooth movement and it all just looks good.
XIGNCODE3 is another popular anti-cheat like Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye that currently causes issues for Linux and it’s going to hopefully see support (thanks Reddit) for Linux and the Steam Deck by launch.
Valve published new versions of Proton and Proton Experimental last night.
With the latest Proton Experimental update as of yesterday, NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is now working for Direct3D 12 games when setting the “PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1″ environment variable and using a supported NVIDIA graphics card on a new enough driver. Proton was previously working for DLSS Vulkan titles while now DLSS for D3D12 games should be working with the above met conditions.
Two big bits of news for Steam Play Proton today with two new versions getting released so let’s take a look and see exactly what’s new for the Windows compatibility layer.
Firstly, NVIDIA announced back in August that DLSS would come to Proton in September for DirectX 11 / 12. Well, their date was a bit off there it seems but Valve / CodeWeavers managed to pull in DLSS support for at least DirectX 12 in Proton Experimental as of September 30. To enable it you need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 as a launch option for games. Additionally this release also fixes crashes in Project Wingman, Satisfactory and other Unreal Engine 4 games using the Vulkan renderer.
While we skipped August because of the summer holidays, the month of September 2021 brought some great releases, starting with the awesome Thunar file manager, which received not one but two maintenance updates, up to version 4.16.10.
While Thunar 4.16.9 introduced support for using the move action when dragging files of different users, the ability to open the correct folder when middle-clicking in tree-view, fixes a issue where a folder was missing in history when it was opened in a new tab, and disabled automatic queueing of file transfers, Thunar 4.16.10 only addressed a regression that could crash the file manager when using the clipboard.
Calamares is an independent Linux-distro-installer. It was recently added to FreeBSD ports as well, although you won’t be able to use it as an installer yet. The Calamares project is KDE-adjacent – but independent – so it participates ins some things that KDE projects do not. One of those things is Hacktoberfest.
Travel is slowly returning, and that shows in many improvements of KDE Itinerary being driven by real-world testing and feedback again in the past two month since the last summary.
Linux refers to the kernel on which distributions are built. You can think of it as the core to all systems that are running on Linux.
Linux distributions are the download links featured above – such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc. These are collections of software and configurations that have been packaged with the Linux kernel. A team of developers is responsible for each distro, and attaches their own branding or moniker (i.e. “Linux Mint) to it. Typically, the devs will release free updates and support for the distro they’ve created.
Another term you’ll hear often is GNU, or GNU/Linux. The GNU project is responsible for a massive amount of the free software you’ll find availalble across all Linux distributions.
While the Linux kernel provides an operating system with its core functionality, the GNU software, as well as software from other developers, allows us to interact with the operating system and do things. Since GNU and Linux are both so integral to Linux distributions, the term GNU/Linux is exceedingly common.
Both the Linux kernel and GNU software are free. That’s why so many Linux distributions exist in the first place. Anyone is free to take these components, bundle them together, add their own spin to the package, and then release the finished product as a separate operating system (Linux distro). This is very different than systems like Microsoft Windows, where the code for the OS and its applications are locked tightly behind a closed source and copyright laws.
GNOME 41 has reached openSUSE Factory staging and KDE’s Plasma 5.23 is nearing a release in an openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot as it progresses through staging.
openSUSE’s rolling release turned out four snapshots this week and updated software packages like Mesa, curl, catfish, PipeWire, Perl and more.
The 20210928 snapshot improved the transferring of data via an update of curl 7.79.1, which made it work with OpenSSH 8.7; the command line tool and library also adjusted a setup to not change connection data upon repeat invokes. An update of inkscape 1.1.1 fixed a crash and improved the startup time of the graphics editor application. Two other packages updated in the snapshot were yast2-network 4.4.26 and yast2-nfs-client 4.4.1; the latter had an update that supports systemd mount options in fstab.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
After the massive update in the last week due to a full rebuild caused by glibc 2.34, this week seems ‘somewhat’ quieter. Or at least from a Release manager PoV less involvement hungry. Yet, we managed to release 5 snapshots during this week (0923, 0924, 0926, 0927, and 0928).
Garbage collecting with podman system prune. Tells me it freed 20GB when it seems to have freed 4GB. Wondering where that discrepancy comes from.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are like fuel for digital transformation, enabling companies to develop applications and microservices quickly. DataTrucker.IO is a new, free and open source (Apache 2.0) no-code/less-code API backend that decreases the time required to build APIs.
As Red Hat OpenShift continues to evolve and improve, our efforts to promote developer success ramp up as well. The OpenShift developer dashboard provides sample applications that are just a few clicks away from deployment. These samples are spread across a wide range of software development interests and stacks, so you’ll probably find one of interest to you.
For OpenShift 4.8, four new samples have been added, while four others have been updated. A total of 14 samples are at hand for the new or curious developer. We’ll review all the samples in this article.
“Welcome to the family.” That’s how it should feel right from the start when new people join the team at any company.
Of course, relating a workplace to a home is an ambitious promise. To live up to it, you need to ensure that your people experience a safe place where they can be who they are with no fear of being punished or humiliated for sharing their ideas, raising concerns, or making mistakes.
We’re excited that Call for Code will be participating in Hacktoberfest again this year. Now in its eighth year, Hacktoberfest is a global online festival meant to drive contribution to and involvement in open source projects.
Both Call for Code and Hacktoberfest encourage contributions from people of all backgrounds and skill levels. Call for Code is of course a great opportunity for experienced open source contributors to get involved in projects that address social and humanitarian issues, but if you’re brand new to open source projects, we’ve got you covered there as well. Our “Call for Code: Introduction to Open Source” online course is available at no cost and introduces you to key concepts, tools, and processes that you need to start contributing to any open source project. Start learning, and earn a badge by completing this course.
Linux Mint 20.3 will be dubbed “Una” and will be the third major update to the Linux Mint 20 series based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, which, of course, will be supported with software updates and security patches until 2025.
Most probably, Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” will be derived from the recently launched Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS point release, but, like with Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma”, Linux Mint 20.1 “Ulyssa”, and Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana”, it will stick to the long-term supported Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series rather than using the newer Linux kernel 5.`11.
Powered by a Raspberry Pi 4B microprocessor, Mini Pupper uses Ubuntu and ROS to run its FSN (Full Self-Navigation) System. It also supports SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), which allows it to map its surroundings and learn in real-time from objects around it using Lidar or a camera sensor.
The Pocket P.C. (aka Popcorn Computer) is a handheld Linux computer based on Allwinner A64 with 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, a 4.95-inch Full HD display, and a QWERTY keyboard that was introduced in 2019, and reminds me of PocketCHIP from a few years also with an Allwinner processor, a display, a keyboard, and a battery.
The initial plan was to start shipping the device by May 2020, and there are been delays for reasons we’ll explain below, but the good news is that Source Parts has just announced the developer units had been shipped.
UDOO is known for its x86 boards that embed an Arduino compatible MCU, but the UDOO KEY is different, as it does without an Intel or AMD processor, and instead, combines Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with Espressif ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth WiSoC.
As we noted in the past combining Raspberry Pi Pico/RP2040 with ESP32 does not make a lot of sense in most cases, but here’s the UDOO KEY will be offered for just $4 for the first units, so they’ll basically throw the ESP32, an IMU sensor, and a microphone for free since it’s the same price as one Raspberry Pi Pico, before eventually selling the device for $20.
Teaching children concepts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is extremely important as the world is becoming even more dependent on people with those skills. To help achieve this goal, Leyla Tawfik, Serena Cangiano and the Ethafa team came up with a series of interactive learning solutions that they call “STEAMMIANS.” Each one targets a particular subset within the field of electronics and their first, “Eolim,” is focused on guiding kids ages 9-11 on how to use certain kinds of sensors to perform various actions.
The Fairphone 4 from the Dutch manufacturer Fairphone BV was officially presented yesterday. Like its predecessors, it is a mid-range device whose concept is characterized by fair conditions in production and the use of raw materials that are as clean as possible. The modular structure stands for longevity and easy repairability. For the first time, the manufacturer is offering a generous guarantee period of five years, which is unusual in the industry.
Google Drive is a popular cloud storage service that works great for the most part.
However, it may not be the most private option out there. So, to take total control of your data, the best way is to spin up a Nextcloud instance and store your essential data while getting access to other collaboration tools.
While that sounds good to hear, not everyone can put the effort to create and maintain their instance. This is where ecloud comes in—built by the same team behind /e/ OS, the de-googled Android operating system.
Now we’ve got ourselve a handy script for cross compiling, I think it’s time to introduce other means of cross compiliing and why I not using existing methods.
Pmbootstrap is a script to build packages for postmarketOS. It supports cross compiling and various other options, it also handles dependencies for you. And you can use apline ports build files directly without hacking it as we did on part two for ArchLinux. Most important, it’s available as pip package. Meaning you can use it to build packages for postmarketOS even if you’re not on Apline Linux! PinePhone is well supported by PostmarketOS and Plasma Mobile developers also work closely with PostmarketOS developers. If you have postmarketOS installed on your pinephone or any Android phones postmarketOS supports (there are over 1000 devices postmarketOS supports), do try pmbootstrap.
KaiOS is based on the code of Mozilla’s Firefox OS and the third major version has just been released. The success of KaiOS shows how much Mozilla had backed the wrong horse with Firefox OS. Kai OS Technologies from Hong Kong did not concentrate the development of the operating system on smartphones or TV sets, but on the promising category of feature phones.
It’s been long time from my last update about Firefox news on Linux and I’ve finally got some time to sum up what we’ve been working on for last year and what’s coming. There haven’t been introduced any new exciting features (from Linux perspective) for the last year but rather a hidden but important changes.
From Linux desktop developers perspective 2021 is a year of Wayland. KDE has been shipping decent Wayland compositor which becomes default for Fedora 34. It’s actually pretty fast and gives you smooth feeling of “good old times” with X11/Gtk2/name-your-favorite environment where any graphics change was just instant without lags or slow transitions. I must mention Robert Mader who created a new Firefox Wayland SW backend for the KDE.
LibreOffice’s QA community works on identifying, testing and fixing bug reports from users around the world. Gabriele Ponzo, a long-time LibreOffice contributors and part of The Document Foundation’s Membership Committee, tells us about how a bug was recently fixed in just under eight hours…
Diamantedesk is an open source web-based Ticketing, help-desk solution aims to allow you to customize for business needs.
Diamantedesk offers reliability, flexibility, scalability, and extensibility for many enterprise sectors like IT support, shipping, customer services, healthcare and more.
It is built to improve customer service and convert feedback into valuable experience
The system comes with a rich set of features and fancy look with informative dashboard filled with graphs, charts, and logs.
[...]
It is published under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0).
Qt 6.2 LTS is now available not only to be the first release with long-term support of the sixth major version of the framework , but also to start laying the foundations that will allow developers to truly transition from Qt 5 by having almost achieved the parity with version 5.15, which has become the penultimate LTS.
Qt 6.2 LTS comes with many interesting news that should give it a strong boost and open the door to many projects to start the migration to the current major version of the framework . Of course, before starting to explain the news, those responsible recalled the main aspects of Qt 6, which already we summarized at the time .
What stands out the most about Qt 6.2 LTS is the inclusion of a large number of new modules to approach parity with version 5.15, which are the following: Qt Bluetooth, Qt Multimedia, Qt NFC, Qt Positioning, Qt Quick Dialogs, Qt RemoteObjects, Qt Sensors, Qt SerialBus, Qt SerialPort, Qt WebChannel, Qt WebEngine, Qt WebSockets, and Qt WebView . On this aspect, the company has said that “the API for these modules is mostly compatible with previous versions of Qt 5 and will only require minor adjustments of the user code when it is transferred to Qt 6” .’
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 912 other packages on CRAN.
This new release brings us Armadillo 10.7.0 released this morning by Conrad. Leading up to this were three runs of reverse dependencies the first of which uncovered the need for a small PR for subview_cols support which Conrad kindly supplied.
PoCL is the open-source project implementing OpenCL for CPU-based execution as well as multi-device support by getting its Portable Computing Language implementation working atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA, AMD GPUs via HSA, and other experimental implementations through leveraging LLVM/Clang.
Arm engineers have begun landing their Armv9 enablement work in the GNU compiler toolchain.
Yesterday brought the initial Armv9 commits to GNU Binutils. This included adding armv9-a to -march for the GNU Assembler as well as for GAS adding the Cortex-X2, Cotex-A510, and Cortex-A710.
Programming languages are one of those topics that we geeks have some very strong and often rather polarised opinions about. As new concepts in computing are dreamt up, older languages may grow new features, if viable, or get left behind when new upstarts come along and shake things up a bit. This scribe can remember his early days programming embedded systems, and the arguments that ensued when someone came along with a project that required embedded C++ or worse, Java, when we were mostly diehard C programmers. Fast forward a decade or two, and things are way more complicated. So much choice, so much opinion.
Computer programming, also known as coding for short, is not about which language you use. It’s about developing programming logic and learning to think like a programmer. The language you start with should be the one that helps you the most in this endeavor. So you have to ask yourself the question: “What do you want to do as a programmer?”
For example, if you want to work on Android app development, video game development, desktop GUI applications, or just general software development, I think learning Java is an excellent option. It’s the language I chose, and it has made a whole world of programming available to me. In India, where I live, the average salary of a Java programmer is around 5.9 Lakhs per Annum (LPA) (it can be as high as 10 LPA, depending on your experience.)
Java is a vast language, though, with lots of frameworks and variants to choose from. Core Java is the term the tech industry has developed to refer to the central components of the Java language—the thing that people use to write the frameworks and has developed the cottage industry around Java. I believe that Core Java is one of the most powerful skills you can acquire because understanding the basics of Java gives you a significant advantage when learning all of the related tools built on top of it.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 186. This version includes the following changes:
The termination of the IdenTrust root certificate (DST Root CA X3) used to cross-sign the Let’s Encrypt CA root certificate resulted in problems with Let’s Encrypt certificate validation in projects using older versions of OpenSSL and GnuTLS. Problems also affected the LibreSSL library, the developers of which did not take into account past experience related to failures that occurred after the AddTrust root certificate of the Sectigo (Comodo) certification authority expired.
Recall that in releases of OpenSSL up to and including the 1.0.2 branch and in GnuTLS before release 3.6.14 , there was an error that did not allow the correct processing of cross-signed certificates, if one of the root certificates used for signing expired, even if other valid ones were saved. chains of trust (in the case of Let’s Encrypt, the aging of the IdenTrust root certificate does not allow verification, even if the system supports its own Let’s Encrypt root certificate valid until 2030). The essence of the error is that older versions of OpenSSL and GnuTLS parsed the certificate as a linear chain, while according to RFC 4158, a certificate can represent a directed distributed circular graph with several trust anchors that need to be considered.
Attackers can use BloodHound to easily identify highly complex attack paths that would otherwise be impossible to quickly identify. Defenders can use it to identify and eliminate those same attack paths. Both blue and red teams can use BloodHound to easily gain a deeper understanding of privilege relationships in an Active Directory environment.
It is a single page JavaScript web application, built on top of Linkurious, compiled with Electron, with a Neo4j database fed by a PowerShell ingestor.
Kali is a Debian based distribution aimed at penetration testing. I haven’t felt a need to use it in the past because Debian has packages for all the scanning tools I regularly use, and all the rest are free software that can be obtained separately. But I recently decided to try it.
Here’s the URL to get Kali [1]. For a VM you can get VMWare or VirtualBox images, I chose VMWare as it’s the most popular image format and also a much smaller download (2.7G vs 4G). For unknown reasons the torrent for it didn’t work (might be a problem with my torrent client). The download link for it was extremely slow in Australia, so I downloaded it to a system in Germany and then copied it from there.
[...]
Installing VMs for both these distributions was quite easy. Most of my time was spent downloading from a slow server, trying to get SCSI emulation working, working out how to convert image files, and testing different compression options. The time spent doing stuff once I knew what to do was very small.
We, the undersigned civil society organizations and independent experts, call on Member States of the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) to take urgent action at the ongoing 48th regular session of the HRC to denounce the unfolding and unprecedented scale of human rights violations by States facilitated by the use of the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware and provide immediate, robust support for impartial and transparent inquiries into the abuses.
We are deeply alarmed by the Pegasus Project revelations, a major investigation conducted by Forbidden Stories, and a consortium of 16 media organizations, alongside Amnesty International who was a technical partner in the investigations. The investigation was based on a leak of 50,000 phone numbers of potential targets of NSO Group surveillance technology, a list which includes journalists, activists, human rights defenders, lawyers, world leaders, and civil society actors. So far, at least 180 journalists in 20 countries were identified as potential targets of Pegasus spyware between 2016 to June 2021.
Adding to the revelations, further cases of targeted surveillance continue to unfold. The most recent victim targeted by Pegasus spyware is the Budapest-based photojournalist Dániel Németh. According to an investigation by media organization Direkt36 and forensic analysis by Citizen Lab, independently validated by Amnesty International, two of Németh’s phones were hacked by a government client of the NSO in early July 2021. Németh is not the only Hungarian journalist to be hacked using Pegasus, Amnesty International’s forensic checks confirmed that two of Direkt36 investigative journalists, András Szabó and Szabolcs Panyi, and another investigative reporter, Brigitta Csikász, were also hacked in 2019.
As the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) convenes at the ongoing 48th regular session, Access Now joins 94 civil society organizations and independent experts in urging member states to denounce abuses facilitated by spyware technologies.
The Pegasus Project revealed a long list of journalists, activists, human rights defenders, lawyers, world leaders, and civil society actors that were a target of NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware. The U.N. HRC should mandate comprehensive measures to investigate and prevent further violations linked to the sale, export, and use of Pegasus spyware and cases of targeted surveillance.
“Member States must urgently act to address the perpetual human rights abuses by States facilitated by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware,” said Laura O’Brien, UN Advocacy Officer at Access Now. “The clandestine surveillance industry must be held accountable.”
The recent revelations showcased the unprecedented scale of human rights violations by States facilitated by the use of Pegasus with Budapest-based photojournalist Dániel Németh being the latest victim targeted by the spyware.
Roman Dobrokhotov, the editor-in-chief of The Insider, has responded to new criminal charges that he allegedly crossed the Russian border illegally. The criminal case “was conjured out of thin air,” he argued in an editorial published by The Insider, asserting that he was within his rights when he left the country in August, weeks after federal agents raided his home and interrogated his parents. Russian officials seized his international passport at the time, but Dobrokhotov says he maintains his general civil passport.
Cybersecurity risks now affect everyone, but those risks aren’t the same everywhere. The Record spoke with Access Now’s Asia Policy Director and Senior International Counsel Raman Jit Singh Chima about how the human rights organization helps secure activists and journalists around the world. Chima, who also serves as the organization’s global security lead, shared details about risks facing human rights defenders in the Asia-Pacific region—from spyware and social media monitoring to disrupting access to certain apps or the entire Internet.
Protecting civil society from these threats must be a key part of cybersecurity policy discussions, Chima told The Record, much like we think about how we need to protect power grids and other utilities that keep society functioning.
“Understand that people who protect civil liberties, rights, and democracy are critical infrastructure and need to be talked about as such when you engage in cybersecurity conversations with national governments in this region,” he explained.
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